These considerations do not serve, however, to differentiate mysticism sufficiently from the general course of religious thought. Alienation from, and yet implicit oneness with, the divine are the two poles on which all religious speculation and practice revolve. It follows from the above that mysticism is distinguished from other religious theories of the relation of man to God by the intensity with which it realizes the divine factor in the relation. The realization is so vivid that, though the theory takes its rise in the needs of the individual, the individual tends in the sequel to be lost altogether in the excess of the divine light. All relations tend to become unreal for the mystic except that between himself and God; his very sense of personality is weakened. The mystical ideal, therefore, is not a life of ethical energy among mankind; it is the eye turned wholly inwards, the life spent in contemplation and devout communion. The type of character to which mysticism is allied is passive, sensuous, and feminine, rather than independent, masculine, and ethically vigorous. In full-blown mysticism the individual may be said to be deprived of the rights which belong to him as an ethical personality.

The speculative bias, it will be seen, is much stronger in the mystic than in the generality of religious persons; and his speculative insight, it may be added, is usually much finer than theirs. The ordinary man, in religious matters as in others, constantly speaks of the infinite in such a way as virtually to make it finite. As Spinoza says, he passes confidently from finite to infinite and contrariwise, but never attempts to bring the two ideas together. Now mysticism does bring them together, but unfortunately in such a way as to paralyse the individual for action. Ultimately stated, the explanation of this result is to be found in the mistaken categories under which the relation is conceived. The conception of a universal substance or ground of things is naturally the first resort of the mind awakened to speculation; and it is a form which constantly recurs when men are roused afresh to philosophical activity. Nevertheless, the conception is evidently rude. It expresses properly a relation existing between material things in space; and, when applied elsewhere, is necessarily inadequate, analogical, metaphorical. But it is characteristic of mysticism that it does not distinguish between what is metaphorical and what is susceptible of a literal interpretation. Hence it is prone to treat a relation of ethical harmony as if it were one of substantial identity, or chemical fusion; and, taking the sensuous language of religious feeling literally, it bids the individual aim at nothing less than an interpenetration of essence. And, as this goal is unattainable while reason and the consciousness of self remain, the mystic begins to consider these as impediments to be cast aside. Our consciousness of self is the condition under which we possess a world to know and to enjoy; but it likewise isolates us from all the world beside. Reason is the revealer of nature and of God; but, by its very act, reason seems to separate the things reasoned about. Hence mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire,—a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject and object are one. This is the intuition or ecstasy or mystical swoon which appears alike among the Hindus, the Neo-Platonists, and the mediaeval saints. And here it will be observed that the original acceptance of metaphor as speculative truth has terribly avenged itself; for, with the renunciation of self-conscious reason, the divine has been degraded into an object of sense, and its highest realization has come to be placed either in a state of brutish torpor or in a moment of equally unnatural nervous excitation. Not that mysticism always appears in this extreme form, but such is the goal towards which it constantly tends. If the sensuous metaphors of unsophisticated religious feeling be put forward as a metaphysical theory of the supersensuous, it is only to be expected that the practice deduced from· such a theory will be a sophisticated or morbid development of sense, a strain put upon the bodily organs to make them yield a realization of the theory and achieve what is impossible to the sane and conscious reason. The morbid play of the nerves is objectified by the over-driven brain and treated as a sensuous union of the created with the creative spirit, an actual seeing, nay, tasting, of the divine essence.

To sum up, then, we may say that, compared with pantheism, mysticism is dependent upon a specifically religious impulse; but, whereas religion is ordinarily occupied with a practical problem and develops its theory in an ethical reference, mysticism displays a predominatingly speculative bent, starting from the divine nature rather than from man and his surroundings, taking the symbolism of religious feeling as literally or metaphysically true, and straining after the present realization of an ineffable union. The union which sound religious teaching represents as realized in the submission of the will and the ethical harmony of the whole life is then reduced to a passive experience, to something which comes and goes in time, and which may be of only momentary duration.

From these general remarks it will be sufficiently apparent that mysticism is not a name applicable to any particular system. It may be the outgrowth of many differing modes of thought and feeling. Most frequently it appears historically, in relation to some definite system of belief, as a reaction of the spirit against the letter. When a religion begins to ossify into a system of formulas and observances, those who protest in the name of heart-religion are not unfrequently known by the name of mystics. At times they merely bring into prominence again the ever-fresh fact of personal religious experience; at other times mysticism develops itself as a powerful solvent of definite dogmas.

A review of the historical appearances of mysticism will serve to show how far the above characteristics are to be found, separately or in combination, in its different phases.

In the East, mysticism is not so much a specific phenomenon as a natural deduction from the dominant philosophic systems, and the normal expression of religious feeling in the lands in which it appears. Brahmanic pantheism and Buddhistic nihilism alike teach the unreality of the seeming world, and preach mystical absorption as the highest goal · in both, the sense of the worth of human personality is lost. India consequently has always been the fertile mother of practical mystics and devotees. The climate itself encourages to passivity, and the very luxuriance of vegetable and animal life tends to blunt the feeling of the value of life. Silent contemplation and the total deadening of consciousness by perseverance for years in unnatural attitudes are among the commonest forms assumed by this mystical asceticism. But the most revolting methods of self - torture and self - destruction are also practised as a means of rising in sanctity. The sense of sin can hardly be said to enter into these exercises; that is, they are not undertaken as penance for personal transgression. They are a despite done to the principle of individual or separate existence.

The so-called mysticism of the Persian Sufis is less intense and practical, more airy and literary in character. Sufism (probably derived from σοφός) appears in the 9th century among the Mohammedans of Persia as a kind of reaction against the rigid monotheism and formalism of Islam (see Mohammedanism, vol. xvi. p. 594). It is doubtless to be regarded as a revival of ancient habits of thought and feeling among a people who had adopted the Koran, not by affinity, but by compulsion. Persian literature after that date, and especially Persian poetry, is full of an ardent natural pantheism, in which a mystic apprehension of the unity and divinity of all things heightens the delight in natural and in human beauty. Such is the poetry of Hafiz and Saadi, whose verses are chiefly devoted to the praises of wine and women: Even the most licentious of these have been fitted by Mohammedan theologians with a mystical interpretation. The delights of love are made to stand for the raptures of union with the divine, the tavern symbolizes an oratory, and intoxication is the bewilderment of sense before the surpassing vision. Very often, if not most frequently, it cannot be doubted that the occult religious significance depends on an artificial exegesis; but there are also poems of Hafiz, Saadi, and other writers, religious in their first intention. These are unequivocally pantheistic in tone, and the desire of the soul to escape and rest with God is expressed with all the fervour of Eastern poetry. This speculative mood, in which nature and beauty and earthly satisfaction appear as a vain show, is the counterpart of the former mood of sensuous enjoyment.

For opposite reasons, neither the Greek nor the Jewish mind lent itself readily to mysticism,—the Greek, because of its clear and sunny naturalism; the Jewish, because of its rigid monotheism and its turn towards worldly realism and statutory observance. It is only with the exhaustion of Greek and Jewish civilization that mysticism becomes a prominent factor in Western thought. It appears, therefore, contemporaneously with Christianity, and is a sign of the world-weariness and deep religious need that mark the decay of the old world. Whereas Plato’s main problem had been the organization of the perfect state, and Aristotle’s intellect had ranged with fresh interest over all departments of the knowable, political speculation had become a mockery with the extinction of free political life, and knowledge as such had lost its freshness for the Greeks of the Roman empire. Knowledge is nothing to these men if it does not show them the infinite reality which is able to fill the aching void within. Accordingly, the last age of Greek philosophy is theosophical in character, and its ultimate end is a practical satisfaction. Neo-Platonism seeks this in the ecstatic intuition of the ineffable One. The systematic theosophy of Plotinus and his successors does not belong to the present article, except so far as it is the presupposition of their mysticism; but, inasmuch as the mysticism of the mediaeval church is directly derived from Neo-Platonism through the speculations of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Neo-Platonic mysticism fills an important section in any historical review of the subject.

Neo-Platonism owes its form to Plato, but its underlying motive is the widespread feeling of self - despair and the longing for divine illumination characteristic of the age in which it appears. Before the rise of NeoPlatonism proper we meet with various mystical or semi-mystical expressions of the same religious craving. The contemplative asceticism of the Essenes of Judaea may be mentioned, and, somewhat later, the life of the Therapeutae on the shores of Lake Moeris. In Philo, Alexandrian Judaism had already seized upon Plato as “the Attic Moses,” and done its best to combine his speculations with the teaching of his Jewish prototype. Philo’s God is described in terms of absolute transcendency; his doctrine of the Logos or Divine Sophia is a theistical transformation of the Platonic world of ideas; his allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament represents the spiritualistic dissolution of historical Judaism. Philo’s ethical ideal is renunciation, contemplation, complete surrender to the divine influence. Apollonius of Tyana and the so-called NeoPythagoreans drew similar ethical consequences from their eclectic study of Plato. Wonder-workers like Alexander of Aboniteichos exhibit the grosser side of the longing for spiritual communion. The traits common to Neo-Platonism and all these speculations are well summed up by Zeller {Philos, der Griechen, iii. 2. 214) as consisting in—“ (1) the dualistic opposition of the divine and the earthly; (2) an abstract conception of God, excluding all knowledge of the divine nature; (3) contempt for the world of the senses, on the ground of the Platonic doctrines of matter and of the descent of the soul from a superior world into the body; (4) the theory of intermediate potencies or beings, through whom God acts upon the world of phenomena; (5) the requirement of an ascetic self-emancipation from the bondage of sense and faith in a higher revelation to man when in a state called enthusiasm.” Neo-Platonism appears in the first half of the 3d century, and has its greatest representative in Plotinus (204-269 a.d.). He develops the Platonic philosophy into an elaborate system by means of the doctrine of emanation. The One, the Good, and the Idea of the Good were identical in Plato’s mind, and the Good was therefore not deprived of intelligible essence. It was not separated from the world of ideas, of which it was represented as either the crown or the sum. By Plotinus, on the contrary, the One is explicitly exalted above the νους and the “ideas”; it transcends existence altogether (∈τreκ∈ιvα της ουσίας), and is not cognizable by reason. Remaining itself in repose, it rays out, as it were, from its own fulness an image of itself, which is called νους, and which constitutes the system of ideas or the intelligible world. The soul is in turn the image or product of the νους, and the soul by its motion begets corporeal matter. The soul thus faces two ways—towards the νους, from which it springs, and towards the materia] life, which is its own product. Ethical endeavour consists in the repudiation of the sensible: material existence is itself estrangement from God. (Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was unwilling to name his parents or his birthplace, and seemed ashamed of being in the body.) Beyond the καθάρσια, or virtues which purify from sin, lies the further stage of complete identification with God (ovκ cξω α∕z,αpτiαs eιvaι, αλλά θeov eιvaι). To reach the ultimate goal, thought itself must be left behind; for thought is a form of motion, and the desire of the soul is for the motionless rest which belongs to the One. The union with transcendent deity is not so much knowledge or vision as ecstasy, coalescence, contact (eKo·racrts, ατrλω<rιs, αφή, Ennead., vi. 9. 8-9). But in our present state of existence the moments of this ecstatic union must be few and short; “I myself,” says Plotinus simply, “have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry hitherto not once.”

It will be seen from the above that Neo-Platonism is not mystical as regards the faculty by which it claims to apprehend philosophic truth. It is first of all a system of complete rationalism; it is assumed, in other words, that reason is capable of mapping out the whole system of things. But, inasmuch as a God is affirmed beyond reason, the mysticism becomes in a sense the necessary complement of the would-be all-embracing rationalism. The system culminates in a mystical act, and in the sequel, especially with Iamblichus and the Syrian NeoPlatonists, mystical practice tended more and more to overshadow the theoretical groundwork.

It was probably about the end of the 5th century, just as ancient philosophy was dying out in the schools of Athens, that the speculative mysticism of Neo-Platonism made a definite lodgment in Christian thought through the literary forgeries of the Pseudo-Dionysius. The doctrines of Christianity were by that time so firmly established that the church could look upon a symbolical or mystical interpretation of them without anxiety. The author of the Theologia Mystica and the other works ascribed to the Areopagite proceeds, therefore, to develop the doctrines of Proclus with very little modification into a system of esoteric Christianity. God is the nameless and supra-essential One, elevated above goodness itself. Hence “negative theology,” which ascends from the creature to God by dropping one after another every determinate predicate, leads us nearest to the truth. The return to God (∈vωσ-ις, i‰σιs) is the consummation of all things and the goal indicated by Christian teaching. The same doctrines were preached with more of churchly fervour by Maximus the Confessor (580-622). Maximus represents almost the last speculative activity of the Greek Church, but the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings was transmitted to the West in the 9th century by Erigena, in whose speculative spirit both the scholasticism and the mysticism of the Middle Ages have their rise. Erigena translated Dionysius into Latin along with the commentaries of Maximus, and His system is essentially based upon theirs. The negative theology is adopted, and God is stated to be predicateless Being, above all categories, and therefore not improperly called Nothing. Out of this Nothing or incomprehensible essence the world of ideas or primordial causes is eternally created. This is the Word or Son of God, in whom all things exist, so far as they have substantial existence. All existence is a theophany, and as God is the beginning of all things, so also is He the end. Erigena teaches the restitution of all things under the form of the Dionysian adunatio or deificatio. These are the permanent outlines of what may be called the philosophy of mysticism in Christian times, and it is remarkable with how little variation they are repeated from age to age.

In Erigena mysticism has not yet separated itself in any way from the dogma of the church. There is no revulsion, as later, from dogma as such, nor is more stress laid upon one dogma than upon another; all are treated upon the same footing, and the whole dogmatic system is held, as it were, in solution by the philosophic medium in which it is presented. No distinction is drawn, indeed, between what is reached by reason and what is given by authority; the two are immediately identical for Erigena. In this he agrees with the speculative mystics everywhere, and differentiates himself from the scholastics who followed him. The distinguishing characteristic of scholasticism is the acceptance by reason of a given matter, the truth of which is independent of rational grounds, and which remains a presupposition even when it cannot be understood. Scholasticism aims, it is true, in its chief representatives, at demonstrating that the content of revelation and the teaching of reason are identical. But what was matter of immanent assumption with Erigena is in them an equating of two things which have been dealt with on the hypothesis that they are separate, and which, therefore, still retain that external relation to one another. This externality of religious truth to the mind is fundamental in scholasticism, while the opposite view is equally fundamental in mysticism. Mysticism is not the voluntary demission of reason and its subjection to an external authority. In that case, all who accept...